How to Manage Your Growing Video Collection

We live in a time where technology allows us to easily capture all the special moments in our lives. Videos are a part of our family legacy. They share memorable stories of vacations, birthdays, milestones, and more. Unlike still photos, videos capture the unique mannerisms and voices of the people we love as we celebrate these moments. Whether reliving your baby’s first steps or hearing the laughter of a loved one, videos capture emotions and help us remember our past.

As time passes, many hours of video add up, and you may wonder how to manage them all. Organizing your videos by themes, people, or events will make these memories easier to find, watch, and share. It also makes it faster to turn collections into meaningful projects and gifts for specific family members. Getting started can seem like a daunting task, but our photo managers at Picture This Organized are here to help you gather disorganized videos in various media and turn them into a manageable collection.

Where to Find Memories

Today, our videos are mostly found on our smartphones, tablets, and computers. However, video collections can contain media from the past in the form of VHS, film reels, DVDs, SD cards, and USBs. Our team can take all of your videos from outdated formats and convert them into digital copies that can be accessed by your phone, iPad or computer. Each time a video is converted to a new format, the quality can decrease, so sending us the video in its original format helps ensure the highest possible quality of your videos. Don’t forget to reach out to your loved ones to have them share their video collections of memories captured over the years. They may have footage related to the same events and people that will make your future video projects even better.

Sorting and Converting to Digital

When taking inventory of all of your videos we will sort labeled videos by media type and categorize them by event or theme. This way, you can choose your favorites before we convert them into a digital format. For VHS videos that aren’t labeled, we do a preview to see if there is any family footage worth preserving. Many VHS tapes contain recorded shows or movies as well as family videos. Our clients often have a mix of footage, so after the tape is converted, we can edit out the TV footage.

The videos you want to keep are then converted to digital formats and named to make them easy to find. When creating filenames, we include the event, people, and date in the name. For example, 2022-14-2-Jim bday_IMG 4367.MOV describes what the file contains. This allows you to quickly identify the video you are looking for by searching for these words in your document files.

Rating Your Videos

Video rating ensures that all of your favorite videos are flagged and included in your collection. We will automatically flag videos that are shorter than a few seconds and have you confirm their importance. If they came from a Live photo, we keep the Live photo and don’t include the video in the collection. We also ask you to flag your favorite photos in series such as sports events. The easiest ones to omit are the blurry ones or accidental footage of the floor or ceiling! After all of your favorites are flagged, they are added to the main collection. Then, based upon your preferences, the rest are kept in an archive for you to consider using later.

Editing Digital Files

When gathering videos to be a part of a project, some of them will need to be edited. Our trained team members will remove blank spaces or unnecessary footage from the digital videos or edit longer videos into shorter subclips. Shorter clips organized by people or events are easier to manage than longer videos. They can also be combined in different ways later for unique family gifts.

Sharing and Maintaining Your Collections

For smaller projects, you may be able to share your video collection directly from your phone or via email. For larger files or older converted collections, we can help you share them with others on platforms such as Youtube or Vimeo. When sharing longer videos, Vimeo provides a link to share with your loved ones so that they can enjoy these memories anytime.

Regardless of how you share your memories, you’ll be able to maintain your entire collection for years to come. Picture This Organized helps families manage their video and photo collections by using a SmugMug account where they are centrally located and organized in easy-to-navigate folders.

With the help of Picture This Organized, you can continue to add new videos to your collection, preserving and sharing them to keep your memories and family legacy alive forever! Contact us to learn more about how to manage your growing video collection!